About two millennia ago, the tyrant Herod heard that a boy had been born who would overthrow tyranny’s reign. Herod’s primitive surveillance method wisely didn’t reveal the boy’s location. The learned Roman poet Prudentius four centuries later wrote:
Crazed at the news, the tyrant shouts:
“My successor looms, I’m thrown out —
guards, go, take your swords,
drench the cradles in blood!
Every male infant shall die:
search the nurses’ bosoms,
and at his mother’s breast,
redden your sword with boy’s blood.








